In the following review, Shore offers a favorable assessment of Backlash.

Women’s issues occupy a strange position in the collective consciousness of America. Even 20 years after the ground-breaking work of Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, and others, women’s studies remain ghettoized in small university departments and are dealt with only in limited ways by the mass media. The perception persists that women’s experience can somehow be reduced to a limited body of knowledge, of interest and importance only to a committed minority identifying itself as “feminists.” Backlash, by journalist Susan Faludi, does more than any other recent work to challenge this narrow conception of women’s issues and to compel us to see the forces controlling and crippling women for what they really are: forces working against the interests of everyone.